Dynamic soft shadows
Community Forums/Showcase/Dynamic soft shadows
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| Coming soon. All lighting is dynamic. Nothing is pre-calculated. Thanks for the artwork, Rich. Good job, Arne. We did it.  |
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| It's comming to who? Blitz3D, BlitzMax? |
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| oh wow.....breath taking.....i cant even begin to comprehend how this could be done......it just blew my mind lol Nack |
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| ..if this is Leadwerks engine, then its really really nice..by the way Josh, is there any exporter for your engine geometry from 3DSMAX? |
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| good job i thinks buy yours engine! |
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| Hey, nice! Still not super soft edges to my eye, but very cool of course (best in these forums). Those bumped bricks... are they "modeled in" or is that parallax/normal maps? Just wondering because the shadow edge looks real (ie it follows the stone form) over the raised stone... |
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| Looks great. Makes me interested in getting back into 3d game development. |
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| example? demo thanks |
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| Not sure how these are soft. Can you explain? |
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| I wouldn't even know where to start in making shadows. Damn. |
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| Looks good - I'm guessing it's not stencils? To give us an idea of the speed how many poly's are in that scene? Cheers Stevie |
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| The scene is about 80,000 polys, but polycount isn't really relevant with the renderer. It handles overdraw really well, so it should be able to run 1,000,000+ polys onscreen before the vertex pipeline starts slowing it down. I walked into a corner to get a good view of the light, because the scene is just a lot of repeating arches. I optimized the scene a little, and am now getting 250 FPS on my 8800. On newer hardware, at least, I can have 20-40 lights onscreen and still maintain 100+ FPS. Shadows don't seem to be much of a bottleneck, but the final lighting calculation is. The main trick is to relieve as much work as possible from the CPU. Physics are the main CPU slowdown, but that will soon be running on NVidia's CUDA interface, or at least on a separate thread for multicore processors (Newton 1.6). If Ageia opens up their interface, it could run on a PPU as well. I will talk to them in a few months and see if this is possible. We're basically using the same rendering ideas Unreal Engine 3 uses (from what I can tell and have read), but running under OpenGL instead of DirectX. |
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| so, tell us, is this coming for blitz3d or max? |
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| As Leadwerks told you allready, it's running under OpenGL. So it has to be BMax... |
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Specular reflection adds a lot.  |
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| Wow that looks great :thumbsup: |
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| Can't wait to see this on my PC josh :) Any time idea for the release ? |
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| good ! good! This is a shadow! ;) |
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| too bad its not for blitz. but it looks really good. |
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| i'll be happy if it is for PB or Bmax |
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| Wow- nice work!! So, is this going to be part of your engine, or an addition that can be wrapped to an existing project? None-the-less, if it will only be part of your engine, I'll buy your engine :) |
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It's my engine, which is available as a BlitzMax module. |
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| gooddd!!! i buy your mod!! the shadows is avaible now? |
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| Regardless of my post being deleted. I want this for Blitz3D. |
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| Forgive my noobyness, but I thought BMax was 2D? |
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| "halo" ("Leadwerks") has his own engine though. |
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| Unbelievable. |
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| As Leadwerks told you allready, it's running under OpenGL.So it has to be BMax... Er no, it didn't have to be BMax. There are a number of OpenGL engines for B3D, this just doesn't happen to be one. |
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| This looks impressive but there seems to be something wrong with that last screenshot. It's a bit too shiny but, more than that, the shadows on the stop-valve thingy suggest another light source but it's not affecting the floor shadows by the barrels. I could be reading too much into it though. |
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| I just bought the Engine. This looks damn good. :) |
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| Wow, Fantastic! That last one looks good enough to be the output from a hi-end 3d package like max, maya, blender or something :) If its OGL is there any cross platform plans? |
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| It's not fair - he is teasing us with sexy pictures of it. Anyone know if the media is included? |
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| I purchased this engine around 2 weeks ago and I think even for its extremely low price you'll be getting a AAA quality game engine that competes with the big guns in the industry. I'd get it before Josh comes to his senses and ups the price. ;) Although The Engine comes with built-in scripting I just purchased BlitzMax to get the most out of it. BlitzMax + LWE is one awesome combination for game development! |
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| It's still a relatively incomplete engine. These aren't implemented yet (as per what the site says): Basic shader handles normal maps, cubemaps, specular highlight, etc. Support for reflective and refractive materials. Leadwerks: Any programming example code of setting up a 3D graphics interface and displaying simple objects? Or a command set list? I won't purchase blindly just by looking at pretty pictures. Because, we are talking about spending 100$ for LWE + 60$ for BMAX. ...Oh wait.... BMAX is now 80$ !!! EDIT: I got the 1.11 engine demos. Is it possible to get the latest, or at least a 1.13 one? Cheers Leadwerks. |
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| There will be a new demo for the new version. You should wait and try out the demo. |
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| Leadwerks, is it possible for me, right now, to do this sort of water with your engine? http://www.blitzbasic.com/gallery/view_pic.php?id=1586&gallery=&page=3 This is a snapshot image took while testing an old runtime of my game project, using AShadow and Blitz3D. It is using reflection and refraction. I'm also using (not seen on this image) post processing effects such as bloom (influenced by looking at light source), blurr (influenced by movement speed), DOF). Also, are all the functions to add triangles, vertices, surfaces, meshes implemented and fully working, at decent speeds in your engine? Cheers. |
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| O_o How is this done? I think we're all dying to find out. |
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| Forgive my noobyness, but I thought BMax was 2D? MiniB3D, I suppose? |
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| Forgive my noobyness, but I thought BMax was 2D? MiniB3D, I suppose? BlitzMax is a 3D engine that comes with a 2D command set. 3D modules/command sets can be added. |
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| The mesh/surface functions are identical to Blitz3D's except for the AddVertex() command: AddVertex surf:TSurface,x,y,z,nx,ny,nz,u,v We don't have water yet. Wait until we do. I'm not in a rush to sell this to you. |
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| Leadwerks, are you going to establish nice relationship between 3Dsmax and your engine within pipeline? Is is possible to build whole level in Max and export it in to mesh format of your engine, including full texturizing within 3dsmax...for vfx Im willing to build my own stuff, but geometry and texture for it I would like to see in 3dsmax...if so, i will be happy to purchase your system for higher price than you charging now.. |
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| I think adding .fbx support is the way to go. You can export a .b3d and load that directly, but I think .fbx will be the best solution as an intermediate format. Collada died from its own bloat. I went on the Collada forum to find someone to write a loader, and I got an offer to do it for like $8000. |
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| In Josh's engine, you can set each object individually to have shadows,physics etc. the the barrels don't seem to have that flag set (possibly for the second light source). Looking really sweet Josh - great work as always. IPete2. |
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| Leadwerks..regarding license, what is the situation? If I purchase your engine, is that only for current 1.xx version or its free updates all time like B3D, or what is scenario?? I cant see any info about that on your web site... |
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| BlitzMax is a 3D engine that comes with a 2D command set. 3D modules/command sets can be added. Dont you mean BMAX is the language and there is choice of 3D engines to use with it, i am understanding this is a new 'engine' in the vein of OGRE, minib3d etc. and will have a Bmax wrapper. correct? |
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| For those who are also wondering about the shadows and shading on the 3 closest barrels: it's exactly how nature does it too. There is another light source coming from the camera's side, as you can see from the valve shadow. Shadows of solid objects do not cumulate. Try it yourself: lift your keyboard so that you can see it's shadow, and then put your mouse under the keyboard, do you see a seperate mouse shadow? No. In the picture, the main shadow comes from the barrel which is closest to the lantern, that's your keyboard shadow. If you have a shadow coming from a transparent object, that's a whole different story, then you can indeed cumulate shadows. The 3 closest barrels are lit up on their camera side, but if you look even more closely you can see how much brighter they are on the lantern side, especially look at the barrel on the rear right corner. Btw, this whole thing runs at 186 FPS, while even 25 FPS would be enough, considering that all movies on TV are 25 FPS and the human eye cannot register more than 25 FPS. However, I use still 60 FPS in my games, as it brings some computer-related advantages, like natural physics speed, and better sync control, basically things which the eye cannot see. |
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| does it support multiple light sources and multiple lights? |
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| is there gonna be a demo soon? |
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| Very nice but that last screenie makes everything look a bit too plasticky, to me. |
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| Btw, this whole thing runs at 186 FPS, while even 25 FPS would be enough, considering that all movies on TV are 25 FPS and the human eye cannot register more than 25 FPS. However, I use still 60 FPS in my games, as it brings some computer-related advantages, like natural physics speed, and better sync control, basically things which the eye cannot see. This is slightly incorrect. TV is actually 25 video "frames", but 50 (60 in the US) "fields" (which equates to 50 FPS). Film is 24 FPS but relies on increased motion blur and contrast for the eye to fill in the gaps. Games rarely have this perceptual advantage. The minimum to avoid any sense of flicker is 60 FPS, but there may be reasons to go above this. Have you considered that a 60 hz monitor would be unnacceptable to most people. 85 or 100 is much more tolerable at close proximity. Food for thought. |
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| 25 fps are practicaly too slow for an fps game. at least 40 fps are necessairy for an FPS |
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| 25 fps are practicaly too slow for an fps game. at least 40 fps are necessairy for an FPS Depends on the speed of the game. |
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| i can actually see the difference between 75 and 60 fps!! |
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| i can see the difference too ever since the 100Hz revolution in TV systems i am very aware of jerky, stuttering movements. @Leadwerks I am currently following your engine developement with interest. Is LWE+BMax cross plattform? Will it run on win, linux, mac? |
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| The mesh/surface functions are identical to Blitz3D's except for the AddVertex() command: AddVertex surf:TSurface,x,y,z,nx,ny,nz,u,v That's the sweetest bit - my project makes heavy use of creating custom meshes on the fly... brilliant work, great screenshots. Josh, will this work just as well on both PC and Mac? And do you think it would be appropriate for outdoor scenes? |
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| Josh, you always have the best media don't you? Should bring-in a few sales. Eye candy used by the author is not the full story ofcourse. |
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| This engine is a temptation... |
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| There is a compatibility test in the private dev area for those of you who already use the engine. |
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| Those of you who already use the engine and have access to the compatibility test in the private dev area: Is LWE+BMax cross plattform? Will it run on win, linux, mac? |
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| Not right now. As I have explained, I don't have a Mac, and my attempt to use Linux resulted in me uninstalling it and breaking the CD in half. Cross-platform distributions would be a logical step in the near future, but not right now. |
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| I think adding .fbx support is the way to go. You can export a .b3d and load that directly, but I think .fbx will be the best solution as an intermediate format. If it will support the .fbx format (and retain its information for materials and animations), I'll buy the engine straight away. FBX is widely used, more then collada so far being the standard for motion capture, and I never had a problem with it, even when exporting animations and morphs (after all it was originally conceived for MotionBuilder). A serious drawback however is the acquisition of Alias (.fbx developer) from Autodesk, which seemingly led to the lack of support for products not owned by them (such as XSI, which anyway incorporates it in version 6, and Lightwave, where the support is stuck at v8.2). Exchange formats are an issue that Mark Sibly as well will have to address for his future works, since .b3d entirely relied on the userbase for the converters while an universal format would have solved this issue once and for all. From here you can download the SDK (though you probably already know): http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?id=9873630&siteID=123112 Direct download: (FBX SDK 2006.11.1 for Windows) http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/fbx200611_1_fbxsdk_win_enu.exe |
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| Yes, I agree. Windows XP is still a good platform, because it has damn good optimized hardware drivers at the moment (that happened with all Windows in their last moments of their life), until it's support stops on Jan 31, 2008 (source: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx ), but that's still a long time to go. And even when the support stops, we can still use XP for a while, until vendors stop to make driver updates. Then it's time to choose: Linux Slackware, Mac OS XI, or Windows 7. Windows Vista might be a choice too, but not before it has Service Pack 2 and can show that it performs in either CPU or graphics better than any of the previous Windows, else it's just utter crap. |
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| A 3dsMax-Pipeline is nice, but take care that it won't be the only "full-featured" pipeline with material support etc... XSI has one major advantage: it's cheap and affordable by indies who don't have the big bucks for 3dsMax. I know, 3ds vs. XSI is a religious thing, but in my opinion investing a lot of work into a pipeline for a program most users can't afford isn't a good idea unless you want to sell it to AAA-developers. |
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| does it support multiple light sources and multiple shadows |
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| XSI has one major advantage: it's cheap and affordable by indies who don't have the big bucks for 3dsMax. XSI is cheap? The foundation version costs $495 USD, however if you want to use it seriously you need at least the Essentials which ships for $1,995.00, and if you are looking for the full featured package prepare to spend $6,995.00 USD. In that respect, I always thought that XSI was the most expensive package out there, even though the most advanced. [edit: mmh... maya costs the same] I still think that Newtek Lightwave is so far the best value for its money, expecially now with the full v9.5 at $895.00 USD. It's surely the most versatile modeller out there (due to production times often models are done with LW and then ported to XSI), and ships with a superb rendering and material engine. The layout is inferior to XSI, however it has been already improved lately and it should be undergoing major revisions soon. 3DS Max is becoming less and less competitive, and Autodesk policy demonstrated it with the acquisition of Alias and Maya (which was eating 3DS Max's market due to its similarity and superiority). In my opinion, as of today 3DS Max is way behind other industry standard tools (as the two aforementioned ones). |
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| Doiron, I mostly agree with you about Lightwave. Also I like the fact that the interface consists of buttons that display plain English decriptions of their functions rather than arcane icons. Other 3d modelling software should learn from this. The only thing that lets it down is the animation systems - they seem a bit tacked on and patched together. |
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| @Doiron: There might be products out there cheaper than XSI. All I wanted to say is that it wouldn't be good to build a pipeline exclusive for the most expensive product(5000€+ is, at least for me, expensive - and there are no community versions like XSI). I would prefer an engine that either use a multi-app-pipeline like Collada or else or comes with multiple pipelines/support for the bigger modellers on the market. |
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| does it support multiple light sources and multiple shadows. Yes, of course. Point, spot, and directional lights are supported. The directional lights are designed to allocate a more pixels in the foreground than the background, so a 1024x1024 shadow map is fine for an entire outdoor scene. |
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| @JakeL, The whole idea of the Leadwerks Engine is that you should really start with 3DWorld Studio - not Max or XSI or Lightwave (although I guess you can import, exported formats which are supported). 3DWorld Studio has it's own formats for textures too so that users of both get access to great looking art from the offset. 3DWorld Studio's next generation (2008/2009 from what I can tell) will be completely integrated with the Leadwerks Engine, so the whole combination of very powerful feature sets and ease of use are totally intertwined. This means opening 3DWorld Studio and developing your level, shadows, lighting, physics, particles, flares, projectors etc all at the same time, having direct access to seeing how the whole thing looks in the engine as you develop. For me this is a very exciting option, and one which I have been keeping a close eye on for a long while. It will speed up development and production for us indie's and results will be at the AAA level many of us desire access to. IPete2. |
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| That's not entirely accurate. 3D World Studio is good for modeling your scene, but it is not for detail modeling. Also, you could model the entire scene as one mesh in 3ds max and load it in the engine, with collision and shadows. The new lighting does away with lightmapping, so content production can be a lot more flexible now. But yes, your best bet is probably to make your props in max or another modeler, place them in 3DWS and build your scene, and then load that in the engine. |
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| Leadwerks - this looks very good, and has recaptured my interest somewhat in 3d game development. I do have a question though - would my system be powerful enough to handle the scenes shown above, and just what should I expect my system to be able to handle with this engine. For some kind of comparison it runs Doom3 on the Low settings fine, Dawn of War ran on it fine at medium settings. I haven't played that many other 'modern' games on it though. Unreal 2004 demo runs fine on default settings also. My system is an Asus A4K Laptop with WinXP Pro SP2, AMD 3400+ (2.2Ghz it says in Windows Properties on My Computer), 512MB Ram, ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (64MB VRAM). Thanks, Matt |
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| Your CPU is fine. I don't know much about ATI's numbering system, but I know that the x800 and lower doesn't support a 24-bit depth buffer, which is a problem. If you do put together a new system, I really recommend a GE Force 8800. It's capable of doing hardware-accelerated physics, it allows new geometry shaders and instancing, and it processes lighting about 6x faster than a 7800. |
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| Does that mean (not supporting a 24-bit depth buffer) that lighting as shown above is not possible or just at a reduced quality? |
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| It means the shader will attempt to run in software emulation, giving you a framerate of about 1 FPS. |
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| @ Leadwerks: only to be more specific can you tell me what is the MINIMUM hardware (mainly GPU) needed to run your engine? Is it not to compare with any other products it's only to see if I can run it on my machines without problems. (I can't find on your site any tech specs...) Thanks |
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| Josh, Oops - sorry, it is a while since we last chatted so I got that lot wrong then? Whatever the course you take, people will always have favourite modelling apps, so it's advantageous to have the ability to start elsewhere and complete the design inside 3DWS because of the properties settings compatibility with the Leadwerks Engine. IPete2 |
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| The lowest possible card is in theory the GE Force 6800. A 7800 does pretty well, but the 8800 is so much faster than previous generations. It's not just hype, it really is worth the expense. |
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| Any rebate for a current 8800 GTX owner? |
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| Any rebate for a current 8800 GTX owner? :P Leadwerks seems to think an ATI X800 series (R480 gfx core for example) is good for the garbage pile. But running Doom 3 and Half Life 2 with all graphical bells and whistles in decent 6xAAA 16xHQ-ANISO 1024x768 to me doesn't ring the same bells. Is the Leadwerks engine specialized for certain graphics cards only, and discard anything non Nvidia, or any gfx card older than 2005? Is Leadwerks planning on issuing a graphics card compatibility list? |
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| Leadwerks doesn't think ATI X800 is ready for the garbage pile, else they wouldn't spend all day and night to fix the problems with the ATI cards. It would be damn easy, if everyone got a XFX/EVGA NVidia GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX: http://www.siipi.com/public/mika.nsf/blogs/9F4CE3D8B0D98DA8C225732600599E50 A good engine must run also with 10 year old cards, even if it has to disable everything since the card and drivers don't support it, and then the people can still play the game with simple non-shaded graphics. |
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| I remember, last year, Ubisoft released Splinter Cell: Double Agent, which was Shader model 3.0 only. Now let me tell you that my friend that has a Geforce TI 4200 which is a big fan of the Splinter Cell series was quite deceived. And then a hack was released to disable all shaders, and he could finally play the game (32mb video ram on his card). Same with Elder Scroll: Oblivion. A hack was released to disable a couple features (mostly shaders) and to have smaller textures, which enabled old gfx cards to play the game. If John Carmack wanted to only have the best and compromise his efforts, he wouldn't have Doom 3's engine as compatible as back to Direct X 7, think Geforce 2 MX series, and without any 3rd party hacks applied. But I don't want to sound alarming, just bringing some toughts to this. Not everyone has the cash for a 8800GTX. If I had lots of cash, I'd probably have the rights for Croteam's Serious Engine, or the valve Source Engine. |
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| Not everyone has the cash for a 8800GTX. If I had lots of cash, I'd probably have the rights for Croteam's Serious Engine, or the valve Source Engine. Right, because a $500 videocard and a $500,000 game engine are directly comparable. |
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| Yup, I'd rather get the fastest graphics card in the world for $574, and a nice OpenGL, Cross-Platform, State-Of-The-Art (AAA), C++/BlitzMax/etc... programmable engine for $99 with no royalty fees at all with which you can make and sell as many of your own games as you want. And I think I can do much more with that combo than with some outdated valve source engine, and for that money. |
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| Not everyone has the cash for a 8800GTX. There's also a big difference between *having* $600 and being willing to spend $600 on a graphics card, especially since 95% of games out there will work just fine on a significantly cheaper card. |
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| Why would someone pay $600 for an GTX, if you can get an Ultra for $574, well 3 days left on the offer, it ends on 2007-07-31. |
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| When writing games for the casual market any 3d module has to run well on less than cutting edge graphics cards. Unless anybody has a team of programmers and artists that's everybody here. If the Leadworks engine is aimed at people other than people at this site (which is commendable as it's a higher standard) then there are other alternatives for the rest of us. |
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| Yup, I'd rather get the fastest graphics card in the world for $574, and a nice OpenGL, Cross-Platform, State-Of-The-Art (AAA), C++/BlitzMax/etc... programmable engine for $99 with no royalty fees at all with which you can make and sell as many of your own games as you want. And I think I can do much more with that combo than with some outdated valve source engine, and for that money. So you're making the game for yourself, and not to the world? How about making some cash? |
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| When writing games for the casual market any 3d module has to run well on less than cutting edge graphics cards. Unless anybody has a team of programmers and artists that's everybody here. Are you sure that everybody here is either making casual games they intend to sell or has a team of programmers and artists? I didn't think it was quite that black and white here. |
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| I think the Leadwerks engine is exactly best aimed at people at this site, it is the BlitzMax3D Now!, it is possibly even better than the real BlitzMax3D will be, time will show. What's amazing about the Leadwerks engine is it's superior quality, speed and easyness. I've never seen any engine do so advanced stuff with just a few lines of BASIC code in BlitzMax. It's basically like one line: LoadWorld() and you got your game almost done! And all that at the speed of C++. I never spent much time in doing 3D worlds as I'm more a programmer/musician, but with 3D World Builder I can do a cool looking scene with all the lightnings and physics objects included with just a few mouseclicks. I tried Blender too, but didn't have the time to learn it for 3 weeks. And those who charge more than $79 for a 3D level editor can go home. I bought also MilkShape3D a while ago for $25, and the cool thing is that I can do animated models and also complex tube like worlds for the Leadwerks engine with it, as the new Leadwerks engine supports it that you make your whole world in 1 mesh. Remember? Polygons don't lower the FPS, it's the amount of meshes that does it, as the GPU renderer has to start from beginning on each mesh. |
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| So you're making the game for yourself, and not to the world? How about making some cash? Umm no, I make the game to be playable by everyone. I just want totally indepandantly of that also to have the best graphics card in the world, all for a cheap budget. And when the engine is cheap, I can afford my graphics card. |
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| the new Leadwerks engine supports it that you make your whole world in 1 mesh. Remember? Polygons don't lower the FPS, it's the amount of meshes that does it, as the GPU renderer has to start from beginning on each mesh. No engine can do that unless you're entire "world" only uses one texture. It's not meshes that lower the FPS, it's state changes, and no matter how the engine dresses it up, if you use more than one texture, it's binding textures between rendering objects. And textures are just one of the state changes. There are many more. |
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| I'm only stating what the official word from Leadwerks is. And even as a 3D modelling n00b, I know that I can assign multiple different textures to one mesh, even with MilkShape3D. Or wait, maybe the main texture has to contain all the subtextures? I've seen that on some quake models and the light pole from 3DWS. |
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| I'm only stating what the official word from Leadwerks is. Yes, well.. I know that I can assign multiple different textures to one mesh, even with MilkShape3D. Yes, I just said that, in a roundabout manner. The point is, if you *do* apply ten textures to one mesh, the render speed is going to be the same as ten meshes with one texture each. Or wait, maybe the main texture has to contain all the subtextures? I've seen that on some quake models and the light pole from 3DWS. No, that's one way of doing it, but it's not required. |
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| Here's what this argument is all about: The lowest possible card is in theory the GE Force 6800. A 7800 does pretty well, but the 8800 is so much faster than previous generations. It's not just hype, it really is worth the expense. So either your game works with shader model 3, or you don't use the features proposed in this thread by Leadwerks, and you're product will be more compatible with the smaller card models. Hopefully the Leadwerks engine will still run on the modest configurations. |
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| So either your game works with shader model 3, or you don't use the features proposed in this thread by Leadwerks, and you're product will be more compatible with the smaller card models. That's not quite true either. There are a lot of Shader Model 3.0 cards out there which are lower than the 6800. |
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| Hopefully the Leadwerks engine will still run on the modest configurations. I'm sure it will, I will keep beta testing the new Leadwerks Engine with my AX800XTPE, just to make more pressure on them and make them make the engine run on older systems, and besides I wanna show off my game to my friends who also have random manufacturer's X800s. Meanwhile I will also start to build a new system with 8800 Ultra XXX to convince my friends how crap their ATI is :) You know, same game, different looks. |
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| I consider myself as having a capable system and the Leadwearks Engine does appear to struggle on it. When I tested the demo scenes from 1.20 not much was going on and I was seeing framerates between 50-60 fps. This has me thinking about how the Engine will cope in a more detailed and alive scene. |
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| This is starting to look like a very good engine. The images look like the latest Unreal Engine pics. Does it support normal maps? |
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| If you are developing a game, you are best off aiming for specs a little higher than present-day. I read that when Unreal Engine 3 began testing, they were only getting about 10 FPS. My card gets about 250, and we are still optimizing. The jump in graphics card technology has been pretty significant between the GE Force 6 and 7 series, and even more so with the 8800. If you are satisfied with the same old lightmaps and rendering abilities, the Quake 3 engine is completely free for use. I for one am bored with the same old stuff, and this new rendering technology has me excited about 3D graphics again. Rendering speed is dependent on a few things. We sort rendered objects by material, so 10 materials on 100 meshes means ten materials switches. Number of meshes does affect the renderer, because a new matrix has to be uploaded for each one. The GE Force 8800 allows geometry instancing in hardware, so I expect this not to be an issue in the near future. You can also easily collapse brushes and meshes into one or a few large meshes, with built-in engine commands. Number of polys of course will eventually slow it down, but it is not too important. The engine uses a deferred renderer, meaning it is always rendering to a texture, and we process the final lighting on the resulting color and normal buffers. This makes the engine handle overdraw very well; It takes the same time to process lighting on 100 polys as it does on 1,000,000. In other words, with a forward renderer: time = (scene complexity) x (number of lights) But for a deferred renderer like Leadwerks or Unreal 3: time = (scene complexity) + (number of lights) This is how STALKER is able to draw a seemingly impossible amount of geometry onscreen. There are still some optimizations we are making in the engine, and we are working to ensure compatibility with powerful enough ATI cards. But if you're a game developer, and have anything less than a GE Force 7800, perhaps it is time to upgrade. An 8800 GTS (I have one) is $259.99: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2900232&Sku=E145-8016&SRCCODE=YAHOODF&CMP=SPC-YAHOO And yes, normal maps are supported. ;) |
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| Yes, I agree. Windows XP is still a good platform, because it has damn good optimized hardware drivers at the moment (that happened with all Windows in their last moments of their life), until it's support stops on Jan 31, 2008 (source: www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx ), but that's still a long time to go. XP will still be in its extended support phase until 2014 -- meaning that it won't receive any further enhancements and that you'll have to pay Microsoft if you have questions/problems, but they will continue to issue security patches and the likes until the end-of-life in 2014. Given the reluctance of a good chunk of the market (especially within corporations) to give up XP until it gets pried out of their cold, dead fingers, XP isn't going anywhere any time soon. |
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| Quake 3 is free? [Later] Well I've spent the last hour searching Google, and apart from a coouple of references to Q3 being free, I can't find any such beast. Any links? |
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| The Quake 3 engine is free, and it comes with full source code. The actual game is not free, because of the levels, models, sounds and other artworks. |
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| Q3 is open source. I don't think you can use it for commercial products.</offtopic> |
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| It is free for commercial use, so long as you abide by the GPL. http://www.idsoftware.com/business/idtech3/ |
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| Found it - thanks. Nice. |
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| Bah, the original demos "halo" dished out have hit their 30 day trial periods. "Amon" needs to hand over his 1.20 demo thing. |
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| We have done some more testing, and recommend the GE Force 8800 GTS for development. The GEForce 8600 is 3-5 times slower and the GEForce 7 series is 10-15 times slower. While the 6-7 series and low-end 8 series cards will work for testing, they will probably not be able to handle more demanding situations, and we don't recommend buying them new. My GEForce 8800 GTS still gets 90 FPS with 15 lights visible. |
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| We have done some more testing, and recommend the GE Force 8800 GTS for development. What about for the end user? Should I recommend that anyone who plays my game gets an 8800 GTS as well? My GEForce 8800 GTS still gets 90 FPS with 15 lights visible. 15 lights affecting one mesh? Isn't that a little over the top? I would have thought the visual improvement would have become pretty narrow after three to four lights per mesh. |
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| Yes, unless you don't use any large scenes. We have an optimization that current NVidia drivers don't support yet, but it will save about 50% of the light processing once NVidia fixes it. This may make the 8600 okay to use. Also remember that in 1-2 years the 8800 will be much more affordable. |
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